He listened to her, amused more by her than by the children, and without forgetting painting, murmured, “It is delicious!,” realizing he must do an exquisite scene, with a corner of the park and a bouquet of nurses, mothers, and children. How could he have failed to think of it?
“You care for these urchins, Annette?”
“I adore them!”
From the way she looked at them, he realized she longed to take them up, to embrace them, to caress them with the material and tender longing of a future mother. He was astonished by this secret instinct, hidden in that woman’s flesh.
So then, since she was disposed to speak, he questioned her about her tastes. She readily acknowledged her cravings for success, for worldly glory, along with desires for fine horses, which she recognized with something like the accuracy of a jockey, for a portion of the Roncières farms was devoted to breeding, and she took no more thought of a marriage partner than of the apartment one could always find in the multitude of floors to rent.
When they approached the lake where two swans and six ducks floated calmly past, as clean and calm as porcelain birds, they passed in front of a young woman sitting in a chair, a book open on her knees, her eyes staring above her, her soul having taken flight in a dream. She moved no more than a wax figure. Homely, humble, dressed as a modest girl with no thought of pleasing, perhaps a teacher, she had gone to dreamland, carried away by a phrase or a word that had bewitched her heart. Doubtless she would continue, according to the strength of her hopes, the adventure begun in the book.
Bertin stopped, surprised. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said, “to let yourself go like that.”
They had passed in front of her; they turned back and passed again without her noticing them, so attentively did she follow the distant flight of her thought.
The painter said to Annette, “Tell me something, child! Would it bother you to pose a couple of figures for me?”
“Not at all, on the contrary.”
“Look carefully at that young lady wandering in the realm of the ideal.”
“Over there, on that chair?”
“Yes. Well, you’ll sit on a chair, you’ll open a book on your knee, and you’ll try to do what she’s doing. Did you ever dream while you were awake?”
“Of course.”
“What about?” And he urged her to confess about her excursions into the blue, but she refused to answer, avoiding his questions, staring at the ducks swimming after the bread thrown to them by a lady, and seemed embarrassed, as if he had touched on something sensitive.
Then, to change the subject, she described her life at Roncières, telling about her grandmother to whom she would read aloud for hours every day, and who right now must be quite lonely and sad.
The painter, listening to her, felt as gay as a bird, as gay as he had never been. Everything she told him, all the futile and commonplace details of that young girl’s simple existence, amused and interested him.
“Let’s sit down here,” he said.
They sat down near the water. And the two swans came floating in front of them, expecting to be fed.
Bertin felt memories awakening within him, recollections that had faded, had drowned in inadvertence and suddenly recurred for no reason at all. Of varying nature, they rose so rapidly and so simultaneously that he experienced the sensation of a hand stirring the vase of his memory.
He tried to find what caused this upsurge of his old life that he had felt and noticed several times already, though less often than today. There was always a reason for these sudden evocations, a simple and material cause, an odor perhaps, often a fragrance. How many times had a woman’s dress flung upon him in passing, with the evaporated breath of some essence, the full recollection of forgotten incidents. At the bottom of old scent flasks he had also recovered fragments of his existence; and all the vagrant odors of the streets, of the fields, of the houses, of the furniture, sweet and unwelcome, the warm odors of summer evenings, the sudden chills of winter nights, always revived remote memories, as if such scents, like the aromatics that preserve mummies, retained and embalmed all these extinct events.
Was it damp grass or chestnut blossoms that recalled the past? No. What then? Was he indebted to his eyes for this awakening? What had he seen? Nothing. Among people he had met, someone might have resembled a figure from the past, and without his recognizing the resemblance, the bells of the past had rung in his heart.
Wasn’t it more likely to have been sounds? How often had he happened to have heard a piano, or an unknown voice, even a hand organ in the square playing something he had heard twenty years ago, filling his heart with forgotten sensations. . . . But that continuous, incessant, intangible appeal! What was it around him, close to him, always reviving his extinguished emotions?
“It’s a little chilly,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
He glanced at the wretched on their benches. The chairs cost too much to buy a seat. Annette, too, noticed them now and asked about their existence, their poverty, and expressed surprise that they would come here and sit in this lovely public garden.
Even more than a minute ago, Olivier climbed back over the years gone by. It seemed as if a fly was buzzing in his ears and filling them with the confused music of days gone by.
Seeing him distracted, the girl asked, “What’s the matter? You look sad.”
He gave a great start. Who had said that, she or her mother? Not her mother with her current voice but with her voice of other days, so changed that he took several minutes to recognize it.
“It’s nothing. You can’t imagine how much you delight me. You’re very sweet, you remind me of your mother.”
How could he have failed to notice till now the strange echo of that once so familiar speech which now emerged from these new lips. “Say something, Annette.”
“About what?”
“Tell me what your governesses have taught you. Do you like them?”
She returned to her earlier subjects. And he listened, seized by a growing distress; he waited, amid the phrases of this girl so strange to his heart, for a word, a sound, a laugh that might have remained in her throat since her mother’s youth. Sometimes certain intonations made him tremble with astonishment. Of course there were differences between their words that he had not initially noticed, differences which, quite often, he didn’t confuse at all. But these differences rendered all the more striking this sudden echo of the maternal speech. Thus far he had observed the likeness of their faces with a friendly and curious eye, but lo, the mystery of this resurrected voice mingled them in such a fashion that, turning his head in order not to see the child, he sometimes wondered if it were not the countess speaking to him thus—twelve years ago.
Then, when quite hallucinated by this conjuration he turned toward her, he still found, as their glances met, a little of that faltering with which, in the early days of their love, the mother’s eye had rested upon him.
They had already circled the park three times, always passing in front of the same persons, the same nurses, the same children.
Annette was now inspecting the mansions surrounding the garden, asking the names of their inhabitants.
She wanted to know everything about these people, asked questions with a voracious curiosity, seemed to store her feminine memory with this information, and, her face lit up with interest, listened with her eyes as much as with her ears. But when they arrived at the pavilion that separates the two gates on the outer boulevard, Bertin noticed that it was nearly four o’clock. “Oh,” he said, “we must go home.” And they quietly reached the boulevard Malesherbes.
After he had left the young girl, the painter headed toward the place de la Concorde to make a call on the other bank of the Seine.
He was humming; he felt like running and would have leaped over the benches, so agile did he feel. Paris looked radiant to him, prettier than ever. “No doubt about it,” he said, “spring revarnishes everyone.”
He was in one of t
hose moods when the mind comprehends everything with keener pleasure, when the eyes see more perfectly, seem more receptive and clearer, when one finds a livelier joy in seeing and feeling, as if an all-powerful hand had revivified the earth’s colors, reanimated all conscious life and wound up in us, like a watch that has stopped, the activity of sensation.
He thought, as he gathered in his vision a thousand amusing anecdotes, “To think that there are moments when I find no subject for painting!”
And he experienced such a sense of freedom and clear-sightedness that all his artistic work seemed trivial to him, and he conceived a new method of expressing life, the truest and most original. And suddenly he was seized with a desire to return home and work, which led him to retrace his steps and shut himself up in his studio.
But no sooner was he alone in front of the picture already begun than the ardor that just now had fired his blood cooled. He felt weary, sat down on the divan, and again relapsed into dreams.
The sort of happy indifference in which he was living, that unconcern of the satisfied man whose almost every want is gratified, was gradually leaving his heart, as though something were wanting.
He felt that his house was empty and his studio deserted. Then, looking about him, he seemed to see the shadow of a woman whose presence was sweet to him pass by. For a long time he had forgotten the impatience of the lover awaiting his mistress’s return, and lo, all at once he felt that she was far away, and he wished her near, with the restlessness of youth.
He was moved to think how much they had loved each other, and in that vast apartment, where she had come so often, he had found again innumerable recollections of her: her gestures, her words, her kisses. He recalled certain days, certain hours, certain moments, and he felt around him the soft touch of her former caresses.
He stood up, unable any longer to keep still, and began to walk, thinking once more that notwithstanding this affection which had so filled his life, he yet remained alone—always alone. After the long hours of work, when he looked around him, dazed by the awakening of the man who returns to life, he saw and felt only walls within reach of his hand and voice. Since no woman presided over his home, and he had been unable to meet the one whom he loved except with the stealth of a thief, he had been compelled to drag his leisure into public places where one finds, or purchases, various means of killing time. He had adopted the habit of going to the Cercle, to the Cirque and the Hippodrome on fixed days, to the Opéra, here, there, and everywhere, in order not to return to his home where he would doubtless have rested joyfully had he dwelt there beside her.
In the earlier days, in certain moments of passionate fondness, he had suffered cruelly in his inability to take and keep her with him; then, with diminished ardor, he had accepted unresistingly their separation and his own liberty; now he regretted them again as if he were beginning anew to love her.
And this recourse of tenderness absorbed him so unexpectedly, almost unreasonably, because the weather was fine, and perhaps because he had just now recognized the rejuvenated voice of that woman. How little it takes to move a man’s heart, a man who is growing old, for whom recollection turns into regret.
As formerly, the need of seeing her again returned, entered into his spirit and into his flesh in the fashion of a fever, and he began to think of her somewhat as young lovers do, exalting her in his heart and exalting himself for desiring her more; then he determined, though he had seen her during the daytime, to ask her for a cup of tea that very evening.
The hours seemed long to him, and, as he went out and down the boulevard Malesherbes, he was seized with a fear of not finding her, which would compel him to still spend the evening alone, as, after all, he had spent so many others.
To his question “Is the countess at home?,” the servant answering “Yes, monsieur” filled him with joy; with a radiant air he said “It is I again” as he appeared at the threshold of the little salon where the two ladies were working under the pink shades of a double lamp of English metal on a high thin standard.
The countess exclaimed, “What! Is it you? How delightful!”
“But of course. I felt very lonely, so I came.”
“How kind of you.”
“Are you expecting someone?”
“No . . . perhaps . . . I can never tell.”
He had seated himself, gazing scornfully at the pieces made of heavy gray knitting wool which they were rapidly executing by means of long wooden needles.
He asked, “What is that?”
“Coverlets.”
“For the poor?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It is very ugly.”
“It is very warm.”
“Possibly, but it is very ugly, especially in a Louis XV apartment where everything is pleasing to the eye. If not for the sake of your poor, you should, for the sake of your friends, let your alms be more elegant.”
“Dear me, these men!” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Why, they are making such blankets everywhere just now.”
“I know it well. I know it too well. One may no longer make an evening call without seeing that gray rag dragging over the prettiest gowns and the daintiest pieces of furniture. This spring, it is a bene-faction in poor taste which is the fashion.”
The countess, to test the truth of his opinion, spread the knitting she was holding over an unoccupied silk chair beside her, and then assented with indifference, “Yes indeed, it is ugly.” And she resumed her work. A flood of light fell upon the two bent heads, a pink from the two shaded lamps over the hair and the flesh of the faces, extending to the dresses and the busy hands, and they watched their work with that continuous attention of women accustomed to this labor of the fingers which the eye follows without a thought. At the four corners of the room four more lamps of Chinese porcelain, supported by ancient columns of gilded wood, shed upon the tapestry a mellow, even light softened by lace veils thrown over the globes.
Bertin took a very low dwarf armchair which he could just get into but which he always preferred while chatting with the countess, placing him almost at her feet. She said to him, “You took a long walk with Nanette in the park awhile ago.”
“Yes,” he said. “We gossiped like old friends. I like your daughter very much. She resembles you altogether. When she utters certain phrases, one would think you had forgotten your voice in her mouth.”
“My husband has already told me that very often.”
Bertin watched them work in the lamplight, and the thought from which he had suffered so often, he suffered from again that very day, the anxiety concerning his desolate home, silent and cold whatever the weather might be, whatever fire he kindled in the chimney or the furnace, grieved him as if it was the first time he quite understood his isolation. How truly he would he were her husband and not her lover. Formerly he wished to carry her off, to steal her from this man completely. Today he envied that deceived husband who was installed by her side in the habits of her house and the caressing influence of her presence. Looking at her, he felt his heart was full of old things revived that he desired to say to her. Truly he still loved her, even a little more, much more today than he had for a long time, and the need to express this return of youth that would please her so much made him wish they would send the little girl to bed as soon as possible.
Obsessed by this longing to be alone with her, to get close to her knees on which he might rest his head, to take her hands from which she would let fall the coverlet of the poor, the wooden needles, and the ball of worsted that would roll under a chair at the end of a string, he glanced at the clock, scarcely spoke at all, and thought it really reprehensible to accustom young girls to spend their evenings with the grown-ups.
Footsteps broke the silence in the next room, and the servant whose head appeared announced, “Monsieur de Musadieu.”
Olivier Bertin restrained a rising rage, and when he shook hands with the inspector of fine arts he felt much inclined to seize him by the shoulders and
fling him out the door.
Musadieu was full of news; the ministry was about to fall, and there was a scandal whispered about concerning the Marquis de Rocdiane. He added, glancing at the young girl, “I’ll tell you all about that a little later.”
The countess looked up at the clock and discovered it was about to strike ten. “Bedtime for you, my child,” she said, addressing her daughter.
Without replying, Annette folded her work, wound up her worsted, kissed her mother’s cheeks, held out her hand to the two gentlemen, and left the room swiftly, as if she glided away without disturbing the air as she passed.
When she had gone, the countess asked, “Well, what’s your scandal?”
“They say that the Marquis de Rocdiane, who had separated from his wife under an amicable arrangement, she paying him an income considered insufficient by him, had found a certain and unusual means to get it doubled. The marchioness, tracked by order of the marquis, had been surprised and obliged to purchase with a new pension the official report drawn up by the commissioner of police.”
The countess listened, curiosity in her glance, her hands motionless, holding in her lap the interrupted work.
Bertin, already exasperated by Musadieu’s presence since the young daughter’s withdrawal, was annoyed and asserted with the indignant manner of a man who knows and who has not chosen to discuss the calumny with anyone, that it was an odious lie, one of those shameless slanders that society should never listen to or repeat. He was growing angry, standing now against the fireplace with the nervous manner of a man disposed to make a personal question of a common report.
Rocdiane was his friend, and if on certain occasions he might have been accused of levity, he could not be accused, or even suspected, of any really questionable act. Musadieu, surprised and embarrassed, was defending himself, receding, finding excuses.
“Permit me,” he said, “I heard that statement just now at the house of the Duchess de Mortemain.”
Bertin asked, “Who told you such a thing? A woman, without doubt.”
Like Death Page 9
